As has been discussed in this thread, there won't be a site update this year, but here are the current, unofficial, positions. Albums and songs from 2015 are included, but the list of 3000+ songs that will be added next year are not included here.´

A lot more movement in the songs list compared to the albums list, even though a large number of new albums lists has been added. So many albums lists that have been added to AM over the years, that a few additional lists don't make much of a difference anymore.

The songs lists that have been published/discovered during the last year or so are generally from less "fashionable" sources than before. I think it has both its pros and cons. Anyway, you will see a big boost of the classic rock canon.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" has unofficially overtaken the number one spot from "Like a Rolling Stone", but with about the smallest margin possible. Right now they are virtually tied in the top!

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Everyone you meet fights a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.

It doesn't surprise me that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has overtaken "Like a Rolling Stone." I figured it would happen someday, given that it would be the canonical song for a generation of new critics. (Much the same way "Vertigo" finally overtook "Citizen Kane" in the last S&S poll.)

Neat. Thanks. Also, Like a Rolling Stone is the greatest song ever. Period. End of story. I love Nirvana, and like so many people, Nevermind was the first album I ever bought. I'm a little bit in shock actually.

Do you all think it would be a good idea to use this unofficial update for my planned countdown video? I doubt any of the 3,000+ songs to be added would make the top 1000, but I wonder if I should wait until an official update to make it.

Very much loving the large boost that Leonard Cohen's gotten here, although in general, it seems like much of the past fifteen years is getting diminished in favor of very classic-rock "canon" type songs.

Are you now only attributing two artist albums to primary artists? i.e. Billy Bragg & Wilco's Mermaid Avenue? Because California Stars was fully written by Wilco, and Billy Bragg only played rhythm guitar. Don't think it's fair to dock them one of their highest rated songs.

Mostly good. The heavy hitters balanced out to break about even (though I would trade the upward gain for "Purple Rain" and "Kiss" for an equivalent gain for "1999"). The mid-range songs did pretty well as well. Happy to see big boosts for "Let's Go Crazy" and "Controversy". I wish "Uptown" got the love that "When You Were Mine" gets, but I'm happy for that as well. There is a general big dropoff toward the bottom, though, particularly for his 90s stuff. It's a shame that "Diamonds and Pearls" and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" are the ones to make advances, because while I enjoy them, they are far too sappy in comparison to the better songs from that period that took heavy hits.

Very chuffed for "Lovesong" and "Lullaby"! I'd trade all of the gain for "Close to Me" and "Boys Don't Cry" for an equiavlent gain for "A Forest". And man, The Cure's lower-level songs here got hammered. Happy to see the debut of "Fascination Street", though, a top 3 Cure song.

Hooray for "Rhythm Nation"! A generally good update for Janet. I do wonder, though, when critics will realize that Rhythm Nation 1814 deserves more representation than the title track. It's easily her best album, and one of the best pop albums of all time.

I see many Spanish songs from last ten years between 5000 and 10000th place but there's no Joan Manuel Serrat''s "Mediterraneo", a classic from 1971 that I have seen it on many lists. I am curious about this particular case.

It's not an official update, but since there are songs in place and there is a new version of the list, is it okay to begin a new version based on this list?

I'd love that! There are a few songs I've been dying to nominate for the next Unacclaimed.

Alright. But just before I do, I noticed a flaw in my formatting.

I took the format of this year's tournament to referendum, and the winning format (by one vote) was "128 songs, single elimination (moderately style)".

The problem with this is unlike Moderately Acclaimed Songs or Albums, I have no convenient way to "Seed" them because by the logic of the tournament, they are all unranked. And I don't know how a random jumble would work in this setting.

There will be 128 songs this year no matter what, but should I keep the "World Cup" format or go with the "Moderately Format"? And if the latter, how shall I group the songs?

It's not an official update, but since there are songs in place and there is a new version of the list, is it okay to begin a new version based on this list?

I'd love that! There are a few songs I've been dying to nominate for the next Unacclaimed.

Alright. But just before I do, I noticed a flaw in my formatting.

I took the format of this year's tournament to referendum, and the winning format (by one vote) was "128 songs, single elimination (moderately style)".

The problem with this is unlike Moderately Acclaimed Songs or Albums, I have no convenient way to "Seed" them because by the logic of the tournament, they are all unranked. And I don't know how a random jumble would work in this setting.

There will be 128 songs this year no matter what, but should I keep the "World Cup" format or go with the "Moderately Format"? And if the latter, how shall I group the songs?

I'd definitely go with the World Cup format. It lessens the chance of one favorite being eliminated early by another due to luck of the draw. For the first Unacclaimed, I overcompensated for this by having it as a double elimination tournament, and it really killed participation. The World Cup format seems like a good compromise.

Hooray for "Rhythm Nation"! A generally good update for Janet. I do wonder, though, when critics will realize that Rhythm Nation 1814 deserves more representation than the title track. It's easily her best album, and one of the best pop albums of all time.

Yeah I'm going to have to disagree with this because this is:

However, I do agree that RN1814 probably doesn't get as much love as it should. It got her into the pop mainstream but Control is a perfect album to me or very close to it.

Control is great too, but I think "Funny How Time Flies" and "He Doesn't Know I'm Alive" are rather pedestrian. Not bad, but inessential, IMO. The six big singles and "You Can Be Mine" are ace, though!

Rhythm Nation 1814 is one of just 3 albums I've heard where I rate every song a 9 or higher. Strangely enough, Prince doesn't have such an album (1999 is really close, though, and may end up becoming the 4th).

Moonbeam wrote:Control is great too, but I think "Funny How Time Flies" and "He Doesn't Know I'm Alive" are rather pedestrian. Not bad, but inessential, IMO. The six big singles and "You Can Be Mine" are ace, though!

Rhythm Nation 1814 is one of just 3 albums I've heard where I rate every song a 9 or higher. Strangely enough, Prince doesn't have such an album (1999 is really close, though, and may end up becoming the 4th).

Really, though, you can't go wrong with either album.

Funny How Time Flies, love that song. Not pedestrian at all. He Doesn't Know I'm Alive I can probably co-sign with you on that. That is probably the weak link on the album.

So I've geeked out a bit more with the song list. I've put together a big spreadsheet with song ratings (something I'm hoping to share with the forum so that we can get recommendations via correlations), and this update is not looking so Moonbeam-friendly.

I looked at relative change for each song I had rated as (old position - new position)/(old position), so a value of 0.2 means a song improved its ranking by 20%.

Here is how these changes played out for various levels of my song ratings (with number of songs in brackets):

Here are the relative changes for the top 20 artists. By the way, I'm treating songs from 2014 and earlier that were previously unranked to have a former position of 7000, and songs that fell out of the top 6000 to have a new position of 7000.

As others have noticed, virtually every song from the 21st century has taken a tumble in the charts. Words cannot express how crestfallen I feel. I am really grateful this is not an official charting, and I hope to see some good news for the past 15 years of music, in the real update next year.

Despite my attitude, thanks again to Henrik for giving us a glimpse behind the scenes!

I believe there's also been updates where the 21st century generally moved upward together. It's a combination of which sources provide lists between years (and the discovery of lists that predate parts of this era can generally hurt it) and I'm assuming the unknown factor of how Henrik weighs certain information.

Either way, I've always been curious why it always seems to be a blanket change, as if modern music as a whole has been shifting in acclaim instead of individual works. It could also be something like:a. Album A is #1 for its year and places near the top 100b. Albums B-Z are ranked based off how well they did against Album A in the EOY listsc. As time goes on, Album A is revealed to be slightly weaker and therefore tumbles a bitd. Being that most have only appeared on EOY lists, albums B-Z fall simply due to Album A falling

I'm wondering if it's something like that. So if all the information we have on an album is that it's half as acclaimed as Channel Orange, that value is incredibly different if Channel Orange is in the top 100 compared to it being in the 170 range. I guess it all depends on how relative this information is treated.

BleuPanda wrote:I believe there's also been updates where the 21st century generally moved upward together. It's a combination of which sources provide lists between years (and the discovery of lists that predate parts of this era can generally hurt it) and I'm assuming the unknown factor of how Henrik weighs certain information.

Either way, I've always been curious why it always seems to be a blanket change, as if modern music as a whole has been shifting in acclaim instead of individual works. It could also be something like:a. Album A is #1 for its year and places near the top 100b. Albums B-Z are ranked based off how well they did against Album A in the EOY listsc. As time goes on, Album A is revealed to be slightly weaker and therefore tumbles a bitd. Being that most have only appeared on EOY lists, albums B-Z fall simply due to Album A falling

I'm wondering if it's something like that. So if all the information we have on an album is that it's half as acclaimed as Channel Orange, that value is incredibly different if Channel Orange is in the top 100 compared to it being in the 170 range. I guess it all depends on how relative this information is treated.

BleuPanda, you are definitely onto something. From the AM About page:

All match-ups are summarized into a score for each album. This score is then adjusted due to which opponents the album has been matched against. As it usually takes a while for albums to reach "classic" status and appear in critics' all time lists, new albums (which mostly have been matched against other new albums in the end of year lists) tend to get low "opponent values".

When recent songs are poorly represented in new all-time lists this yields not just lower "initial scores" but also lower opponent values for recent songs. So for the final score, which combines the initial score and the opponent value, there's a double negative effect.

Everyone you meet fights a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.

That's certainly an impressive list, and must be the result of much research and hard work.

There are some esoteric looking artists in there, and I wondered how certain genres are embraced into the list whilst others seem rather bypassed, even where their artists get significant critical acclaim. The obvious one is country music, where some of the singer-songwriters / artists like Vince Gill, Mary Chapin-Carpenter or Alison Krauss don't get a mention in the 9000 entry list, let alone the 6000 entry one, and even cross-over artists from the past decades like Linda Ronstadt or Emmylou Harris don't feature as much as one might expect.

Similarly country-folk and country-rock entries seem rather sparse with the likes of the James Gang or Poco omitted, and John Denver only getting a single entry in the 6000. There are also artists who some might say have an orientation to Nashville like Bonnie Raitt, who always seems well received by the critics, but who is only managing half as many entries in the 6000 as the likes of more pop-oriented Britney Spears or Taylor Swift.

My theory is that the obstacle for country artists is that Europe and other parts of the world don't have much affinity for country. Country music is certainly not as popular or influential outside the USA. There may also be a bit of a bias against country due to its association with the American "heartland," given that most music critics are from big cities (or, at least, exhibit an urban sensibility).

I've also noted a smaller but quite real disparity between the rankings of golden-age hip-hop and recent rap releases. Almost every rap release pre-2000 is ranked too low. A few albums from the 1990s managed to escape hip-hop's historical ghettoization by (generally white) critics, but the rankings of that genre don't really take off until the 21st century, when rap crossed over not only into the American mainstream but, more importantly, to Europe. For example, Dizzy Rascal is good, but his music can't hold a candle to the artists he liberally borrows from. I think Dizzy (and others) were embraced by an audience not really familiar with his sources. Plus, the special significance of urban slang (much of which, for older works, is no longer in use) to rap music is an additional hurdle for, say, a primarily French-speaking listener. Of course, it works the other way, as well: non-English works are under-ranked, too.

Last edited by digifuwill on Wed Sep 14, 2016 3:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

A great example of the short shrift country music gets in these rankings is especially noticeable this year. In 2016 three truly towering figures in popular music have passed. While I wouldn't put Merle Haggard on quite the same level as my first and third favorite musicians of all-time, clearly Haggard's talent, output, and influence merit his inclusion in the same conversation as Prince and David Bowie. And, at least in the U.S., that's how his passing was treated. But compare their rankings on this site: the works of Bowie and Prince are ranked highly and frequently, while Haggard has a staggering ZERO ranked albums and just four ranked songs. As an artist he's ranked just 953, one spot below AlunaGeorge. I mean, come on.

digifuwill wrote:A great example of the short shrift country music gets in these rankings is especially noticeable this year. In 2016 three truly towering figures in popular music have passed. While I wouldn't put Merle Haggard on quite the same level as my first and third favorite musicians of all-time, clearly Haggard's talent, output, and influence merit his inclusion in the same conversation as Prince and David Bowie. And, at least in the U.S., that's how his passing was treated. But compare their rankings on this site: the works of Bowie and Prince are ranked highly and frequently, while Haggard has a staggering ZERO ranked albums and just four ranked songs. As an artist he's ranked just 953, one spot below AlunaGeorge. I mean, come on.

Not to nitpick here, but I don't think Merle Haggard's influence was as widespread as David Bowie or Prince, not even in the U.S. Although chart positions aren't everything, take a look at how the Billboard Top 200 looked in the weeks following the deaths of these three legends.

David Bowie and Prince are in the conversation for the very best of their genres (and they crossed multiple genres). Merle Haggard is a country legend, but I don't think he's on the same level of influence or acclaim as someone like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, or Gram Parsons.

To add, most publications like RS, Pitchfork, NME, Mojo, etc. that churn out lists that it seems their life depended on it as well as most critics are almost exclusively rock oriented with a few exceptions like Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. But really the real reason is that, let's face it, rock is the dominant genre.Also, not being rude here, there's a certain double standard when it comes to genre-specific lists. For example, RS came out with its greatest country songs but it was deemed ineligible as shown here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3608&p=52488&hilit=rolling+stone+country+songs#p52488

Jonathon wrote:Henrik, I have no desire to stress you out more in future years, but I have to ask...with the song list expanding from 3000 to 6000, to 10,000, are we due for an album list expansion by decade's end?

Maybe in the 2018 update, but probably not as far as 10,000.

Everyone you meet fights a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.

Jonathon wrote:Henrik, I have no desire to stress you out more in future years, but I have to ask...with the song list expanding from 3000 to 6000, to 10,000, are we due for an album list expansion by decade's end?

Maybe in the 2018 update, but probably not as far as 10,000.

I always figured a bigger album list would be problematic, as you'd start to run into a lot of hit albums that by and large, were not critically acclaimed, but one or two critics liked them (Like Creed's Human Clay or something.) At that point it ceases to represent true acclaim and just becomes about statistical noise.

Still as a huge fan of late 90s-early 00s American indie rock, albums like Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Yo La Tengo, and The Flaming Lips with 4-5 bubblers a piece would receive a massive boost if their bubblers became ranked albums. Thus I've always been hoping for that.

The album update has ups and downs for me but that song list sees so many personal favorite go down and very few nice (for me) surprises.

Nice to see some surprising omissions finally make it to the list though: September, Rainy Day Women, Child in Time, Walk on by, Gimme Danger, Barbara Ann, La Foule, Polly, Let there be Rock, Dreadlock Holiday, Takeover, J'ai Deux Amours, No ufo's, Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, Water No Get Enemy, Pas Assez de toi, Indian Summer and a bunch of others have to be present when you talk about the greatest songs of all time (also surprised a song as a'themic as New York, New York only shows up now)Also happy to see Emily and Broken Heart which are 2 lovely songs... Too bad all those new (pre 2014) entries start with the Final Countdown and ends with How You Remind Me...

Last year's update, Joni Mitchell's only song in the top 1000 was "Big Yellow Taxi", which I don't see as a fair testament to her musical prowess in terms of both writing and performance. It's still her top song, but she's got two other, better songs in the top 1000 now, so it's less of a shame.

"Music is powerful, man. It speaks to a primal pit in our brains. It makes anyone want to get up and get their knees going!"— Jake the Dog